Video: Editing pictures with the improved picture tools

You probably don't think of Excel as being the software to use if you want to edit pictures, but the 2010 version has some excellent tools to manipulate images, which could be useful when you need your worksheets to really make the best impression. So let me show you a couple of things here. Let's go to the Insert tab, and because we're inserting pictures, that's why we're in the Insert tab, click Picture. And in the Exercise Files in the Chapter4 folder, you should have this 04_04_olive_tree_valley.jpg. Double-click it, and I'll just move this out of the way, because we're going to have some menus coming back.

Editing pictures with the improved picture tools

You probably don't think of Excel as being the software to use if you want toedit pictures, but the 2010 version has some excellent tools to manipulateimages, which could be useful when you need your worksheets to really makethe best impression.So let me show you a couple of things here.Let's go to the Insert tab, and because we're inserting pictures, that's whywe're in the Insert tab,click Picture. And in the Exercise Files in the Chapter4 folder, you should havethis 04_04_olive_tree_valley.jpg.Double-click it, and I'll just move this out of the way, because we're going tohave some menus coming back.

Now, the picture is okay, but it's kind of dark.We want to brighten it up a little bit.We might want to recolor it or put some artistic effects.So the first thing is make sure it's selected so we have the Picture toolssection in the Format tab.So over here, click on Corrections, and this is the default.This is where we're starting out.Now, you can make this a little brighter, maybe a little too bright, and itshows you what the Brightness and Contrast settings are going to be.I'm going to choose this one here.I want it to be a little sharper, so I'm going to go back here, and this isgoing to be kind of blurry.

This might be a little too sharp.So I'm going to choose this one here, and that's fine.Now, we might want to recolor it.I'll move this out of the way here, so go to Color, and if we want black-and-white, we can do that to remove the color, or we can saturate it a little bit more.So if we want this looking a little bit more verdant, now, this looks reallyfalse color, so we don't want to do that, so I'll choose this.We could also change Color Tones, if we want.If we wanted to recolor it and have something like pure black-and-white with veryhigh contrast, or something like a duotone or a tritone, we have these options, also.

Pretty cool, I think, that a spreadsheet program has these.So I'm going to reset this back here, because I want to show you some artistic effects.So click on Artistic Effects, and you have some pretty neat options, if youwant like Pencil, Sketches and very blurriness, some diffused glass here, ifyou want a texture of some sort, and you can do all sorts of things with your images.Now, if you decide that, well, maybe that's a lot of fun, but I really want thisimage back to the original way that it was when I inserted it,well, rather than deleting it and reinserting it, all you have to do is go uphere and choose Reset Picture.

You can also Reset Picture & Size.We didn't change the size. There it is.So there's the slightly underexposed image that we started with.I'll move this back down here. And we have some borders that we can choose andjust slide these over.Now, unlike the corrections of the color, these borders will take effect only if we click.It won't be just on rollover, and click this down arrow here, and we have allsorts of other really neat-looking options here,so things that you really would not expect to see in a spreadsheet program, ifyou want to change Border Colors. You can see it's going to get a thin colorover there. I'm not going to put a border on here.

Actually, what I'm going to do is I want to reset this, because I want to showyou how we can use some of these pictures in SmartArt.So leave it selected, and go over here to Picture Layout.Now this is going to take your image and it insert it into SmartArt, andyou see we have all these different SmartArt features available, which Ithink is pretty cool.I like this Hexagon here.So I'm going to call this Olive Grove, press Enter, and I have some bottles thatI want to put in, so I'll call this Olive Oil Bottles.

Well, that's going to go in here.You see there's this Picture icon.So click it and also in the Chapter4 folder of the Exercise Files, you have this04_04_bottles.jpg, and just double- click that, and that gets inserted, also.Now we can just close this.So I think this is pretty neat that we can put SmartArt and pictures into theSmartArt and do all this editing in the spreadsheet program.You might not know it's there, but it's a pretty handy tool.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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